Has your company adopted a social media policy yet?  Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are increasingly being considered threats for at least a couple big reasons:  security risks and traffic risks.

Use of social medias at work can pose security risks to the company’s intellectual property through an employee’s personal communication habits.  On occasion, attackers assume the identity of someone who hasn’t actually joined sites like facebook.  Then the attacker determines who this person’s friends or schoolmates are and sends friend requests.  Once befriended, the attacker has personal information of users and can make targeted attacks.  Social engineering tactics like this can be very effective, especially when they get users to start sharing URLs leading to malicious sites or spoofs of actual businesses such as your local bank.  In some countries, criminals are not banned from using sites like facebook when they are incarcerated, as The Washington Times recently reported.

Use of social medias at work can also pose network traffic problems for the company.  Read more »

Okay, back to the basics. We’ve been working with Cisco NetFlow technology for many years now, but what is NetFlow?

NetFlow is a traffic profile monitoring technology developed by Darren Kerr and Barry Bruins at Cisco Systems, back in 1996. At that time, network monitoring mostly consisted of seeing how much traffic was traversing your network, but did not include what that traffic was.
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Is cloud computing right for your business?  Will it save your company money?  Gartner Inc.  predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud computing infrastructure.  Inevitably your company will eventually consider cloud services for one or more of the business applications it depends on.  Ask yourself:

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Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

For those of you that missed Plixer’s recent series of webinars, aimed at getting the most out of NetFlow using their latest and greatest NetFlow and sFlow analyzer, there is still hope. A recording of the webinar has been made available online for your viewing pleasure. Just click the image below to watch this 40 minute presentation.

Michael Patterson, Scrutinizer Product Manager, covered a range of topics in this traffic monitoring centric presentation.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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Things reportedly got kind of crazy today when a NetFlow Ninja popped into the Sanford, Maine offices of Plixer International. “He dropped down from the ceiling and handed me a letter demanding an nProbe,”  said Jon Mills, Marketing Manager for Plixer. “The freak was swinging a plastic sword and jabbing at my cubical walls. I nearly spilled coffee on my keyboard.”

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____________________________________
Jim Dougherty aka "Jimmy D"
International Sales Channel Manager and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
____________________________________

Plixer International, Inc., a leading global provider of network traffic monitoring and analysis tools, today announced that it has partnered with NTOP of Italy to launch Scrutinizer 7.7 with nProbe™ support for advanced flow-based monitoring to analyze client, server and application latency.  If the flow involves HTTP, the URL information can also be exported. Read more »

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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Scrutinizer v7.6 has been released with several best at NetFlow improvements for network traffic analysis. You will find the upgrade available for download now.

New Features include:

+ Flow View now has a Date Selector
+ Users can name their templates exported from flow devices
+ Time frames for 3, 7, and 30 days have been added to the date selector
+ Volume reports have an option to toggle rate vs. totals
+ A new LDAP wizard has been added to simplify LDAP and LDAPS configuration
+ More definition labels have been added for ICMP Traffic
+ NBAR descriptions will no longer be blank if no template has been received
+ Fixed issue when performing an SNMP update for a PC with nprobe installed
+ Users can now configure thresholds based on a per row or report total basis
+ A new report type of IP Next Hop has been added to the status tab
+ Users who are part of an administrator group can copy myview tabs
+ A new report filter has been added for SUBNET TO SUBNET
+ The interface instance column is wider for high interface numbers
+ A Plixer Tools icon will now be visible when Plixer Tools is installed
+ Users can now add very long community strings
+ Added the ability in mapping to filter Denika reports for Denika connections
+ For new installs, users will automatically be licensed for 30 days
+ Updated the Japanese Translation
+ Improved IPFIX support in the NetFlow and sFlow collector
- Dozens of bug fixes

We are very excited about this new release of our network traffic analyzer. Contact us if you have any questions.

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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We had a customer approach us the other day with an nprobe issue. Apparently, he could see the NetFlow v9 data in Flow View of Scrutinizer, but he couldn’t report on the data. How come?

He sent us a Wireshark packet capture and brought up Flow View. Flow View is a way to see the raw flows (inclusive of all columns) being exported by a device.

Anyway, in Flow View everything looked normal, but then one of our developers spotted the word ‘post’ in front of a couple of import column names. We (and Scrutinizer) expect to see ‘octetDeltaCount’ and instead, the customer had configured nProbe to kick out ‘postOctetDeltaCount’.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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You’ve installed Scrutinizer only to find out that your network hardware doesn’t support NetFlow or sFlow; what now? If you’re in this situation then you’ve come to the right place. I’ve put together a guide on how to configure a Windows nProbe to send NetFlow v5 to your favorite NetFlow collector and analyzer.

Read more »

Paul Dube
Technical Support
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So you’ve heard about NetFlow. It’s exactly what you need. But then you find out that none of the network equipment you have supports it.

I hate having to tell customers that our product won’t work with their networks…

I think it’s partly because of the lost customer. However, I think it’s more because smaller networks mean smaller budgets, smaller budgets mean more affordable equipment and more affordable equipment means no Cisco devices. No Cisco devices means no NetFlow…

Knowing what NetFlow can do for a Network Admin makes me wish it was more easily attainable, but in the real world, amazing products warrant big price tags.

However, even though you may not have Cisco equipment, doesn’t mean all is lost.

If you are really interested in having full visibility on your network, then I invite you to keep reading since we at Plixer would like to offer you a couple alternatives.

Option 1:

If you are running with smaller Linksys routers, then maybe consider the firmware update from the company Brainslayer, called DD-WRT. This Linksys firmware update allows options that previously, only higher end routers supported. One of those new features being flow record export. For more information, please refer to this great blog that highlights DD-WRT.

Option 2:

If you are using any other devices other than the Cisco or Linksys brands, then this might be an acceptable alternative.

Now even though your devices may not be able to export flows in themselves, what if we were to introduce something that could take your traffic and mold it to export as NetFlow? This is exactly what the nProbe software offers.

With nProbe, just install this application on a local Linux server and direct your traffic through the server itself. With nProbe configured and running, it can then export NetFlow record summaries of your traffic to a local NetFlow collector, such as Scrutinizer. nProbe may be a great option for a small business that does not want to purchase new equipment in order to take advantage of NetFlow.

For more information about either option, feel free to take a look at the products on their websites. The extra effort required to get these products running can produce fantastic returns in network visibility.

-Nate